Cassidy Freeman on “Longmire” and what we didn’t see on “The Playboy Club”

If Cassidy Freeman looks familiar, it’s because you’ve seen her in several different kinds of shows, always playing memorable characters. Like Tess Mercer in Smallville, who constantly battled her dark side. Or the red-headed sultry vampire named Sage on The Vampire Diaries. But you might also recognize her from her brief stint on NBC’s canceled The Playboy Club, where Cassidy appeared all-too-briefly as Frances Dunhill, a woman-about-town who was using Nick Dalton as a beard to hide her homosexuality. Now Cassidy is part of the cast of A&E’s Longmire, which you may have started watching for its other major female star, Katee Sackhoff.

>Photo from A&E

Longmire, which has been a huge success in its first three weeks on air, is based on the Walt Longmire book series by Craig Johnson, which follows a police chief as he recovers from the death of his wife and faces re-election in his small Montana town. Cassidy plays Cady Longmire, Walt’s daughter who has come back to Montana from the East Coast to help her father move on with his life. (Sackhoff plays Vic, a deputy under Walt Longmire and one of his biggest supporters.)

Cassidy talked with us about her new character, what we missed from her lesbian character on The Playboy Club and her pick for the Hot 100.

AfterEllen.com: So congratulations on the success of Longmire. You must be pretty excited. Cassidy Freman: Thank you, yeah, very excited.

AE: Can you give us an overview of what we might expect to see from your character, Cady? CF: Absolutely. Cady is obviously Walt’s daughter. She’s like his humanity. She brings him back to his emotional self and she’s his heart and that father daughter relationship is really important and she’s kind of the only thing she has left now that his wife has passed away. You’re going to not only see Cady interacting with her dad privately but also in her own life in Wyoming. In the book she’s in Philadelphia but they wanted this character to be in Wyoming and be present. She’s a lawyer and she wants to go practice law but she doesn’t want to leave her dad. She worries about him and she wants him to grieve her mom and move on and he kind of won’t do that. It’s also think she’s a little scary to be away from the one person she has left in the world, in her family. It’s been beautiful because they love each other but they totally annoy each other sometimes. And she also has a romance on the show, which I won’t spoil but it’s pretty controversial and you’ll get to see the more serious side of the show with the crime drama aspect.

>Photo from A&E

AE: We have a big fan base on our site for Katee Sackhoff can you tell us if you two are going to have any scenes together coming up or tease anything? CF: We do have scenes together coming up. Not a whole lot, but some. And she’s great.

AE: What’s your relationship like with her on the show? Are Cady and Katee’s character Vic friendly? CF: I think they are friendly and totally respect each other but they don’t really know each other. I think that Vic thinks Cady Longmire is kind of a goodie goodie and is annoyed with her girl next door perfect daughterness and Cady is pretty quiet about the things that don’t make her perfect so she actually has more of a darker streak than Vic might not know about. It’s two strong women and they don’t necessarily have any beef with each other but at the same time they are kind of always eying each other like what are you up to.

AE: Which is interesting because you guys are pretty much the only major women on the show so I’m just wondering if there is anything that might happen in future episodes where you do maybe have more of a relationship or a friendship? CF: Yeah, I hope so. The creators of this show have quite a challenge to create not only crime drama aspects but also these complex characters in only 10 episodes and it’s really difficult. I think that crossing fingers that the show continues on that our relationship is going to be fleshed out more.

AE: What interested you in the part and in the show? Were you a fan of the books? CF: I had not read the books yet. My father had. The script came across my eyes when I was finishing Smallville. And you know, when you read things they kind of go in one eye and out the other if that makes sense and this one really stuck with me because it made me slow down while I was reading it. You read other scripts like the Charlie’s Angels and the fast scripts with fight and helicopters and stuff [Laughs] and you kind of get used to that pace. And then this script came and I read it and I had to actually slow down my reading to really feel what was going on and I thought that was really interesting. I thought it was really telling that this was going to be a different kind of show so I wanted to audition for it.